AMD has Ray Tracing GPUs in Development

'parts of the ecosystem are not ready' says Lisa Su

AMD has Ray Tracing GPUs in Development

AMD revealed their Radeon VII graphics card during their CES Keynote (more info here), a reveal which has left many with more questions than answers. What are AMD's plans for real-time ray tracing and how long will it be until Radeon offers an alternative Nvidia's RTX graphics technology?

Both Tom's Hardware and PC World have managed to get interviews with AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, with both outlets confirming that AMD has ray tracing technology on development, with Lisa Su reaffirming that they are on ray tracing "both on the hardware side and the software side".

Lisa Su stated to PC World that "consumer doesn’t see a lot of benefit today because the other parts of the ecosystem are not ready" with regards to ray tracing, saying that AMD is "deep in development" of their own ray tracing technology and that this development "is concurrent between hardware and software."

To Tom's Hardware Lisa Su said that they would "hear more about our (AMD's) plans as we go through the year", suggesting that ray tracing hardware may be revealed by AMD a lot sooner than expected.

Nvidia's RTX series of graphics cards launched almost four months ago, and so far only a two games have implemented RTX features, Battlefield V, which support RTX ray tracing and Final Fantasy XV, which support DLSS at 4K. Earlier this week, UL Benchmarks release 3DMARK Port Royal, a benchmark which utilises DXR ray tracing.

It will be a long time before ray tracing becomes commonplace thing games, likely requiring hardware support within a games console before such features receive wide adoption from developers. This gives AMD an advantage, as they are likely to build the hardware within both the next-generation Xbox One and PlayStation consoles, which could delay the need for widespread ray tracing support for another hardware generation.

Most Recent Comments

No doubt this will end up in consoles too. Hence why it may not be ready.

More likely the fact they are just behind the curve because they don't have the money to keep up with Nvidia. The fact Nvidia launched however means the software will be better once AMD comes out and it'll be a better transition for them than Nvidia.Quote

In other words, We'll let Nvidia do all the early heavy lifting, paying developers the big bucks to incorporate ray tracing and if it becomes a success, we'll jump in with our own hardware at a lower cost. Thanks Nvidia! Quote

Well, RTX started development around the same time the next console SoC designs were being planned out according to them, I think it's pretty obvious that the push for RTRT came from Microsoft &/or Sony and the hardware manufacturers reacted. NVidia has more R&D money & resources so they got something working out first, but from recent comments both have been working on RTRT hardware and software for as long as each other, Microsoft seemingly just as long. There's no way a single hardware manufacturer could develop both the hardware, software, and the paradigms and standards that define them, this was definitely a cross-industry collaboration in more aspects than one, I expect only hardware implementations and basic software drivers to be roughly unique.

I still hold NVidia made a sacrifice for both of them by moving first and getting RTRT hardware to PCs, and I think the fact Navi's design must have been finalised by the time Turing launched if it's coming this year more or less confirms that they weren't too out of step under the hood, one just has some other cards to play and markets to focus on first.Quote

Well, RTX started development around the same time the next console SoC designs were being planned out according to them, I think it's pretty obvious that the push for RTRT came from Microsoft &/or Sony and the hardware manufacturers reacted. NVidia has more R&D money & resources so they got something working out first, but from recent comments both have been working on RTRT hardware and software for as long as each other, Microsoft seemingly just as long. There's no way a single hardware manufacturer could develop both the hardware, software, and the paradigms and standards that define them, this was definitely a cross-industry collaboration in more aspects than one, I expect only hardware implementations and basic software drivers to be roughly unique.

I still hold NVidia made a sacrifice for both of them by moving first and getting RTRT hardware to PCs, and I think the fact Navi's design must have been finalised by the time Turing launched if it's coming this year more or less confirms that they weren't too out of step under the hood, one just has some other cards to play and markets to focus on first.

As I thought also. Unlikely that Microsoft would not have been working closely with AMD on this unless they had planned to move away from their architecture for their consoles.

On the Nvidia side, it was probably a combination of bragging rights and at the time great finances to push these out as early as possible. Now though is a different story. They have lost the Tesla contract, their share prices are a shadow of their peak last year and they are looking at several class action lawsuits from investment banks and big investors, they no longer have cash to wave around and I think this will be reflected this year and depending on where they make the cuts (they will have to, you can't lose that much money and not make cuts, the accountants will be screaming for it).Quote

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